Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

The Haines Borough Assembly unanimously voted to send the question of commercial events in Mud Bay back to the planning commission, which discussed the issue at its last meeting but didn’t take action.

The commission had been tasked with considering definitions of “events venue” and “commercial enterprise” proposed earlier this month by the code review commission, in response to a petition submitted to the assembly last fall by over 100 residents that called for the borough to ban commercial events that aren’t explicitly permitted in the Mud Bay Rural Residential Zone (MBRRZ), south of Carr’s Cove.

Commissioners voiced several concerns with the petition at their March 10 meeting, including that it reflects intolerance and unfairly targets Viking Cove, a vacation rental business that the borough has allowed to host events. The commission ultimately didn’t make any recommendations to the assembly.

“It’s totally within their purview to say, ‘We don’t agree.’ But they need to vote on that and tell us that’s their answer,” Mayor Douglas Olerud said at Tuesday’s assembly meeting.

Planning commissioner Diana Lapham in public comment at the meeting said commissioners “want to do things the right way, and because there was so much misunderstanding, so many things tacked onto this, the commissioners felt that it was a good thing just to postpone it until we had more time to look at it.” She added that the commission already planned to address the issue again at its next meeting, on April 14, as “unfinished business.”

Lapham told the CVN after the assembly meeting that the commission intends to make recommendations to the assembly but first will divide the question into two separate topics.

“Right now the definitions and the ordinance change are coming to us as one topic,” she said. “What we’ll do is divide the definitions out from the ordinance.”

That means the commission likely will make two different recommendations, one about the code review commission’s proposed definitions of “event venues” and “commercial enterprise” and the other regarding requests to change Mud Bay zoning code.

Assembly member Debra Schnabel made a motion to direct the planning commission to recommend creating and codifying a land-use permit for event venues and to identify qualified permittees, but other assembly members said they thought establishing a special permit before codifying definitions would be putting the cart before the horse.

The motion failed 4-1.